Building a truly mission-critical solution for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) runs a worldwide network of embassies and consulates, employing over 14,000 people in nearly 270 offices. One of FCO’s key responsibilities is to support ‘affected persons’ with help, advice, or in extreme situations, extraction from the affected country when a situation becomes unstable (because of natural disaster, political upheaval, acts of terrorism etc.).

Crisis Teams manage these responses using an information system – known as the Crisis Hub – to coordinate their activities and allow information sharing with the Contact Centre Operators. Civica improved the Crisis Hub operation with a system that combines pragmatic, low cost technology with high functionality and maintainability.

Benefits

• Scalability – the ability to rapidly increase the system’s capacity during crises
• Offline working capability
• Increased automation and system intelligence
• Improved management information 
• De-duplication – helping users to identify and resolve possible duplicate cases
• Better mapping – the ability to show the location of affected persons, prioritised by vulnerability, on maps that are updated in real time

Working with Civica helped deliver a great product. Civica's expertise and readiness to listen to our needs and requirements made a real difference. Crisis Hub was the FCO’s first fully Agile IT project, and the approach of Civica and our other partners in the project helped deliver a true digital transformation in our crisis response and a product that has proved such an effective tool in use.”
Simon Wood, Head of Crisis Management Department, FCO

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